OpenOffice Exiles Create LibreOffice to Rival

26th Jan 09:20

A team of developers who left the OpenOffice programme over Oracle's attitude have released LibreOffice 3.3.

The free office suite has all of the features of the current version of OpenOffice with extra features, including embedding standard fonts in PDF documents, a million row spreadsheet, an improved printing interface and new fonts.

"We are excited: this is our very first stable release, and therefore we are eager to get user feedback, which will be integrated as soon as possible into the code, with the first enhancements being released in February," said Caolán McNamara from RedHat, one of the developer community leaders.

"Starting from March, we will be moving to a real time-based, predictable, transparent and public release schedule, in accordance with Engineering Steering Committee's goals and users' requests."

Initially 20 developers left the OpenOffice team to set up the rival Document Foundation, and in the last four months many more have joined, increasing programmer numbers to 100, enabling them to get LibreOffice out earlier than expected.

LibreOffice is a suite of six applications: Writer word processor; Calc, a spreadsheet app; Impress for presentations; Draw for diagrams; Base, a database front end; and Math, an equation editor. It is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.